Life is now a matter of selling oneself to slave-work, building roads or labouring in quarries or mines or on the railways, purposeless, meaningless, real slave-work, each integer doing his [and/ or her] mere labour, and all for no purpose, except to have money, and to get away from the old system. (. . .) It is as if the whole social form were breaking down, and the human element swarmed within the disintegration, like maggots in cheese. The roads, the railways are built, the mines and quarries are excavated, but the whole organism of life, the social organism, is slowly crumbling and caving in, in a kind of process of dry rot, most terrifying to see. (D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy , 1997, Penguin Edition: 223/4).